Reuters

When a Beijing-based military institute in September published a patent for a new high-performance chip, it offered a glimpse of China`s bid to remake the half-trillion dollar global chip market and withstand US sanctions.

The People`s Liberation Army`s (PLA) Academy of Military Sciences had used an open-source standard known as RISC-V to reduce malfunctions in chips for cloud computing and smart cars, the patent filing shows.

RISC-V is an instruction set architecture, a computer language used to design anything from smartphone chips to advanced processors for artificial intelligence.

The most common standards are controlled by Western companies: x86, dominated by US firms Intel, and Advanced Micro Devices and Arm, developed by Britain`s Arm Holdings, owned by SoftBank Group.

US and UK export controls prevent the sale of only the most advanced x86 and Arm designs - which produce the highest-performance chips - to clients in China.

But as the US widens restrictions on China`s access to advanced semiconductors and chip-making equipment, the open-source nature of RISC-V has made it part of Beijing`s plan to curb its dependence on Western technology, although the emerging architecture accounts for a fraction of the chip market.

"The biggest advantage of the RISC-V architecture is that it is geopolitically neutral," the Shanghai government`s Science and Technology Commission said in a report published in April.

Beijing and dozens of Chinese state entities and research institutes, many sanctioned by Washington, invested at least $50 million in projects involving RISC-V between 2018 and 2023, according to a Reuters review of over 100 Chinese-language academic articles, patents, government documents and tenders, as well as statements from research groups and companies.